CaTalyST: Citizens Transforming Society (Tools for Change)

This £1.5 million EPSRC funded 4 year project examines the role of new technology in citizen led innovation looking specifically at Manchester and Derry as sites of innovation. The project includes innovation researchers from Computing, Design Sociology and management, all based in Lancaster University.

The key research questions for this project are:

What is the role of technology in grassroots, community-driven social innovation?

What is the vision of next-generation technologies, designed explicitly with citizen-led innovation in mind?

How can citizen innovations be scaled up and diffused across communities?

How to reflect on the process of multidisciplinary practice itself?

These questions will be addressed through a series of research sprint projects lasting for approximately 6 months proposed by cross-disiplinary teams of researchers from across Lancaster University. In addition to these projects, there will be a series of shorter community-led projects.

Updates

Today we took delivery of the first batch of Catalyst project Local Trade – Local Wealth NFC cards. These will enable customers to register their trades with members of ESTA in Lancaster during the system alpha trials that will commence shortly. The...Read full update

Local Trade is a Catalyst launch pad to create a system which records trading patterns within the local trading economy of Lancaster. We are working with Lancaster Ethical Small Traders Association (ESTA) to create a prototype system using NFC enabled phones and cards to help record the local trading economy. Last night we demonstrated the first prototype to the ESTA group and will be incorporating some suggested changes before ‘in the wild’...Read full article

The term “innovation” has become increasingly prominent in debates in government policy through the establishment of the new UK government department, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills (DIUS) and through reports such as “Innovation Nation.”1 National funding bodies, such as...More information

Looking at rapid manufacturing and 3D printing this conference presentation explores the issues fro the design profession and draws comparisons with the aspirations of the Arts and Crafts movement, radical design groups such as Archigram and presents a set of conceptual tools to provoke further...Read full update